Last weekend, The New York Times published a typically thorough (read: long) article based on interviews with more than 100 current and former employees of the online retail behemoth. What the reporters found is a company that’s “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.”

The story is replete with tales of enforced 80-hour workweeks and employees toiling through holidays, family getaways and recoveries from surgery. Pre-approved Amazon spokespersons are quoted in defence of the corporate culture, but the detractors have by far the biggest voices in the piece. Their descriptions of life at Amazon might best be summed up with the time-tested motivational speech that begins: “Beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Not surprisingly, the piece touched off a firestorm of debate about Amazon’s personality problem. At a time when other IT-driven companies such as Netflix Inc. and Google Inc. are falling over themselves to keep their human capital shiny and happy, Amazon seems to be going the other way: driving its employees to subject themselves and their colleagues to an endless barrage of excessive demands, punishing workloads and criticism verging on abuse.

Pretty damning stuff? Well, maybe, in the court of public opinion. But investors didn’t treat this desultory portrait of Amazonian life harshly.

Amazon shares (AMZN/Nasdaq) climbed on Monday after the article came out, and have since rambled along around US$530, where they started the week. In other words, the market reacted with a big “Meh.”

And so, one could argue, it should have.

This is not to suggest that corporations shouldn’t care about their reputations. Good (and bad) PR matters to customers, suppliers, regulators and (not least) employees.

Chief executive Jeff Bezos took the article seriously enough to send a memo to Amazonians over the weekend, in which he said the company depicted in the article does not square with his vision of life at Amazon. He went so far as to ask employees to let him know directly if they had any experiences like those depicted in the Times.

But should investors abandon companies with bad PR? Maybe — but only when it matters. And there is a big difference between the kind of stuff that’s allegedly going on at Amazon and the scandals that have rocked shareholder confidence in other companies.

For one thing, there’s the context around the “problem.” Amazon now employs more than 150,000 people; the Times spoke to 100 or so. Granted, conducting that many interviews is a prodigious achievement in reportage. But it might not be a representative sample. As anyone who has worked in customer service will tell you, the ones with a gripe tend to be overrepresented in the conversation.

More to the point, there is no evidence that Amazon’s alleged sadomasochistic tendencies are having any impact on financial performance.

Back in the ’90s, Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay might or might not have been the greatest people managers the energy-trading world had ever known, but Enron Corp.’s real PR nightmare arose from a real, direct problem: it screwed shareholders when it cooked the books.

By contrast, Amazon has been very good to shareholders — a group that by the way includes its employees, who get rewarded with stock for performance. Over the past five years, Amazon’s stock has appreciated by more than 320 per cent, on revenue that has nearly tripled.

It’s the uncontested winner in online retail, and it recently posted a 26-per-cent increase in North American sales during its second quarter. It’s constantly innovating and bringing new products and services to market.

Investors have rewarded it appropriately: it has surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as the world’s biggest retailer by market capitalization, at around US$250 billion.

To put it simply, whatever is really going on in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, it’s working — at least for now.

No doubt there are risks to the company’s management style, even if it’s nowhere near as malignant as the Times suggests.

One is that it might begin to have trouble attracting the best and the brightest, and lose the innovative edge to its competitors.

Another risk is that the Amazon Way is very highly correlated with its founder. Employees will put up with extraordinary conditions and demands when they believe in the vision, and Amazon’s vision is Bezos’s.

If something happens to him, or if employees perceive he’s not running the show anymore, they might not be so willing to embrace the company. Shareholders might respond in the same way.

But for now, those are just concerns, not realities. The Times quotes a former employee as saying that Amazon will only change its management style “if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”

Pretty clearly, that day hasn’t come. Until it does, smart investors will continue to tune out the noise.